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Legislation in Albemarle County
The homes and sites associated with Lewis and Clark in central Virginia either fell under Albemarle County's or the city of Charlottesville's jurisdiction. Only the city of Charlottesville passed legislation to protect historic buildings. In Albemarle County there have been several attempts since the 1970s to introduce similar legislation. Member of the Albemarle Board of Supervisor's Advisory Board for Preservation, Sara Lee Barnes, identified education as a portion of all of these movements as well as the best way to preserve historic sites. In her experience, the Advisory Board has had a very diverse group of members and one of the problems the group dealt with was what the different board members believed to be historic. In working to pass an ordinance to protect historic places in Albemarle, the committee has focused on education and identifying historic structures to stress the importance of all types of buildings have to the community's, the state's, and the country's history (Barnes, 2002).
Current member of the Board of Supervisors Lindsey Dorrier led the first attempt to pass preservation legislation in Albemarle County in the 1970s but did not receive support from the county. In the 1980s, a group called Citizens for Albemarle wrote a preservation plan but failed to get any support from the Board of Supervisors to pass an ordinance. In 1994, the county appointed a team, the County Historical Preservation Group, to help create a new plan and ordinance to protect historic homes. The committee proposed an anti-demolition ordinance which would try and save threatened buildings and structures. If the committee could not prevent the structure from being destroyed, then there would be an attempt to try and move the structure, or take it out of context. If the county was unable to move the structure, officials would photograph and document the building before it was destroyed. This ordinance required that the county know what sites were historic so that they could try and save them when an owner or contractor approached the county for a building or demolition permit (Barnes, 2002).
The Board of Supervisors passed the group's plan but not the ordinance. In 2000, the Board of Supervisors appointed another group to implement the previous committee's plans. A big portion of this team's work was the creation of a database that identified historic structures as either well-preserved, threatened, or demolished. The committee focused on all structures, from small kitchens to large houses, because all of these features had historical significance. In an interview, Barnes explained that only four properties in Albemarle have remained in the hands of the original families who owned them. She stated that the new owners often do not know the history and significance of the smaller structures that no longer have a purpose, such as the smokehouses or small barns on the larger properties. New owners often demolished these structures first, whereas the big houses often evolved with new additions and features that continued to make the structure useful and deter owners from destroying the entire building. The purpose of the database was for the county to have the resources to know when building and demolition projects threatened historic buildings as well as to inform citizens as to the history of the building and area around them in order to transform these places from points on the landscape into historical features (Barnes, 2002).